Leipzig

Leipzig grew where two great medieval trade routes, the Via Regia and the Via Imperii, crossed the plain between the Pleiße and the White Elster. It is first recorded in 1015 as urbs Libzi in the chronicle of Bishop Thietmar of Merseburg, and in 1165 Otto the Rich granted it town and market rights. Its fairs date back to 1190 and became the oldest surviving trade fair in the world. The university, founded in 1409, made it a centre of law and publishing, later home to the Imperial Court of Justice and the German National Library.

The city's place in the world rested on commerce, music and the railway. Bach served as Thomaskantor from 1723 to 1750, Wagner was born here in 1813, and Mendelssohn founded Germany's first conservatory in 1843. In October 1813 the coalition armies defeated Napoleon outside the walls in the Battle of the Nations. Leipzig was a terminus of Germany's first long-distance railway in 1839, and Ferdinand Lassalle founded the first German workers' party here in 1863. Industry spread west into Plagwitz, where the Spinnerei became the largest cotton mill on the continent, and the population passed 700,000 around 1930.

Under the Nazis the Jewish community was deported and murdered, and Allied raids from December 1943 destroyed much of the centre. In East Germany the fair kept the city in contact with the Eastern bloc while its population fell; in 1968 the regime demolished the university church. In 1989 Monday demonstrations grew out of the peace prayers at the Nikolaikirche, and the city became known as the Heldenstadt, the hero city. After reunification some 100,000 people left within a decade, but urban renewal from 2000 reversed the decline, and Leipzig has since been one of Germany's fastest-growing cities.

Music is the centre of Leipzig's identity. The Thomanerchor, founded in 1212, still sings in Bach's church, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, founded in 1743, is among the oldest symphony orchestras in the world, and the opera traces its history to 1693. The Bach Archive runs the museum, an international competition and the Bachfest each June; Mendelssohn's and the Schumanns' homes are museums. The city has an equally strong place in the alternative scene: the Wave-Gotik-Treffen, first held in a Connewitz club, now brings around 20,000 people in black to the city every Whitsun.

Books and art are the other inheritance. The book fair each March is the second largest in Germany, the German Museum of Books and Writing, founded in 1884, is the oldest of its kind, and painters of the New Leipzig School such as Neo Rauch work in the studios of the Spinnerei. Goethe studied here and set a scene of Faust in Auerbachs Keller, and a line from the play gave the city its nickname of Little Paris.

Pride in 1989 runs deep, and Leipzig, the merchant city, keeps up a long rivalry with Dresden. The German Football Association was founded here in 1900. Football is divided between RB Leipzig, winner of the German cup in 2022 and 2023, and the older loyalties of Chemie Leipzig in Leutzsch, and Connewitz is known as a stronghold of the left-wing and alternative scene.

About 634,000 people lived in Leipzig at the end of 2025, making it the largest city in Saxony. The population fell from around 600,000 in 1950 to 437,000 in 1998 before growing again strongly; the share of residents with an immigrant background is low compared with other German cities, though it has grown. Around 30,000 students attend Leipzig University, joined by those of the music and art schools, the university of applied sciences and a branch of Lancaster University opened in 2020.

The economy has been rebuilt around logistics, car-making and services. DHL moved the bulk of its European air operations to Leipzig/Halle Airport in 2011–12, BMW and Porsche assemble cars on the edge of the city, and the trade fair, the university, hospitals, media and the creative industries employ many more. Gründerzeit tenement districts such as the Waldstraßenviertel have been renovated since reunification.

Days start early and evenings move outdoors in summer, to the beer gardens, the Karl Heine Canal and the beaches of the flooded mining lakes south of the city. Allotment gardens are part of life, as the Schrebergarten movement began in Leipzig in 1864.

Leipzig's best-known dish is Leipziger Allerlei, a mixture of young vegetables such as peas, carrots, green beans and asparagus heads with morels, which in its classic form also includes crayfish tails, a sauce of crayfish butter and semolina dumplings. Its pastry is the Leipziger Lerche, the "Leipzig lark": until 1876 larks were roasted with herbs and eggs and baked in pastry, and when the Saxon king banned songbird hunting, bakers replaced them with a shortcrust tart filled with crushed almonds and nuts around a cherry that stands for the bird's heart, topped with a lattice of two dough strips.

The local beer is Gose, a top-fermented wheat beer brewed with coriander and salt and soured in taste by lactic acid, which came from Goslar and was hugely popular in Leipzig for centuries. It disappeared for a time after 1945 and has since been revived; Leipzig celebrates a Gose day each November. Saxony's coffee-and-cake habit is strong here, and Zum Arabischen Coffe Baum has served coffee since 1711.

Eating out ranges from historic cellars in the old town's arcades to the pubs and international restaurants of Karl-Liebknecht-Straße and the cafés of Plagwitz. At the Christmas market, stalls serve potato pancakes and mulled wine.